On a nice bright sunny day like this one off the last things you may think
of doing is using your flash, but trust me if you're photographing people on a
bright sunny day by the sea which you could well find yourself doing
your flash can
be an absolute god send,
okay
I've found a couple of skate bums,
Dan, and Laurence they're called, thank you for doing this guys i appreciate it,
as you can see our faces are really really dark despite the fact we're standing in bright daylight sunlight,
that's because
the exposure overall is for the sky and the beach huts and everything else in the
picture
these dark areas
they're right out of range, they're too dark for the camera to be able to capture
along with the bright bits.
This highlight on Laurence's face
and the one on my own they're probably about the correct exposure but it means the
important thing the face you can't see it.
You have to make a choice because it's so far out of range, you can
increase your exposure just open the camera a bit, let some more light in
and then you have the correct exposure for our faces
but as you can see as soon as you do that, the sky goes all wishy
washy and the beach huts lose their colour and
these bright bits here
they're just burnt completely away,
to do that with a video camera you'd have to add in a bank of reflectors
or lighting, and it's much the same with a stills camera.
The great advantage of the stills camera
is that you've got a flash on the top off it.
This technique of using your flash to fill in the shadows is called
fill in flash for obvious reasons.
Now the flash isn't going to effect the bright areas
it can't really it's competing with the sun but it can make an impact on the darker areas,
let's just get rid of these sun glasses a minute so i can see what i'm doing.
Now,
first off all let's just take a picture without any fill in flash
what's so ever, here we go,
great stuff and as you can see
the faces are really dark and the highlights are really bright, so let's
just turn the flash on and by the way i'm using full program mode for this, and by the way i'm using full aperture priority program mode for this.
You can do it in aperture and priority modes but i don't recommend you do it the first time you try
i want you to get your head around how to control the flash and
on what's going on
before you start overloading yourself with apertures and shutter speeds and
all that kind of stuff
I've turned the flash on
let's take the picture.
here we go, same shot again.
Good posing chap,
now that one might be a bit over- flashed, the flash was too powerful
and so it doesn't look very natural,
so what you can do is lower the power of the flash,
see there's a little plus and a minus above that button there, now whatever
camera you've got there will be similar controls some where on it.
If i press that button
and then turn the front dial on my camera
i don't know if you can see there but i'm getting minus or i'm getting plus according
attorney this is tending the flash how to which way i turn it, this is turning the flash power
when i go to plus or minus
it's making it less powerful so let's go to minus, i'm gonna go to minus point seven
okay,
so that's like almost a whole stop of light, that's almost half the amount of light
coming out of the flash, let's take the picture again.
See what it looks like,
here we go,
that's much better, that is a much more natural
looking fill in
without having the shadows, now it's just the same with dedicated flash gun,
dedicated flash gun,
very very similar procedure with it, as dedicated as on your camera
just slot it in there,
switch it on
use the t t l or through the lens mode on the flash gun, that means the
camera's going to measure the light and it's gonna tell the flash gun what it
wants it to do, it's gonna tell it to balance it,
but we don't want that do we, because we want to make the shadows brighter, but not
affect the highlights.
So, you can select
using the little selector here whether you want it brighter or darker, just like you
could, excuse me, with the on camera flash,
i'm going to set this to minus one
there we go, that's minus one stop, that means it's a lot less light than the
standard one. Don't start trying to work out those modes, i'm also gonna feather the light, i'm gonna
point the flash head kind of like
away from the guy slightly with a diffuser because it's a nicer, softer
light that's actually going to be hitting them.
Right here we go, good poses these guys,
nice one chaps
very moody, looking down like he wants to kill me.
Straight away that is a really nice fill in flash, you can see the details but
it's still moody
it's kind of a much more
evening border-y look to it.
Fill-in flash is a very very simple technique if you are on the beach having
a picnic with your family on the bright sunny day you've got black shadow's
going everywhere all over the people's faces,
just by setting up your fill-in flash when you arrive when you when you get there
it means your camera is ready to go, just pick it up and you'll get some great shots
of the family having a lovely time.